Injustices of the Enlightenment

The book discusses the relationship between the values of European Enlightenment and the crimes committed by Europeans against indigenous populations in America and those who followed in contact with Europe, as the rosy picture held by many about Western Enlightenment contradicts what happened on the ground and is almost confined to academic books and intellectual ideals. It is not correct to rely on abstract theories in evaluating a civilization, as all humans appear as angels in their idealizations, but their practical application of theories reveals their true nature and the truth of their ideas. We used to see that those who dare to link Enlightenment with the crimes committed by its sons tend to portray these crimes as deviations from its good, free, democratic, human, secular, rational, and scientific content. This study aims to demonstrate the falsehood of that view through the bloody historical events, which were a series of interconnected and logical results of what Enlightenment and European reason legislated in their modern renaissance, and their retreat from their general ideals that imposed interests on a specific path of genocide, colonization, slavery, exploitation, plunder, and theft instead of freedom, brotherhood, equality, and justice, which have become associated with Europeans and often contradict the general linguistic meanings that impress proponents of Westernization. Perhaps the feature of Indian history in America is that it clarifies the impact of the changes accompanying Europe's transition from the Middle Ages, described as dark, to the lights of the modern era, on the treatment of others. It becomes clear that secularism, humanism, rationality, democracy, and freedom, among other Enlightenment slogans, did not erase the effects of religious fanaticism in the Middle Ages, but rather laid a more solid foundation for it, ensuring the preservation of European aggressive interests after faith in sacred books gradually faded. This renewal determined the negative position of others in the Western civilization project, which contradicts their ongoing pursuit of joining its exclusive paradise, even though the vast majority of them have not succeeded in doing so to this day because they did not realize the limits of their theoretical and practical desire to include strangers in their circle, which the positive slogans applied to, but certainly did not extend outside it.